Subject Guides

General Guide for Chemists and Chemical Engineers

Recreational Reading

Balloon Molecules: How to use balloons to build chemical molecule models.
Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen: Warehouse of projects some of the more demented of us tried as young people, collecting many of the classic science projects that have become part of the collective lore of amateur science.
Comical Compounds Gallery: Collection of humorous molecules like Mercedes Benzene, Ferrous Wheel, poly(waunacrackr).
Darwin Awards: Honoring those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it. Of necessity, the honor is generally bestowed posthumously.
DHMO.org (Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division): Unbiased data clearinghouse and forum for public discussion of the controversy surrounding the dangers of H₂O.
Dilbert: Official Dilbert website by Scott Adams.
Improbable Research: Accompanies print version of Annals of Improbable Research; home of the Ig Nobel Prizes.
HowStuffWorks: Award-winning source for clear, reliable explanations of how everything around us actually works.
The Internet Movie Database: Database of movies and actors. Only cheaters use this to play the Kevin Bacon game.
Ironic Times: Weekly news with a humorous twist.
Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names: Actual molecules with funny names. You don’t have to be a chemistry geek to enjoy these, but it probably helps.
Nearing Zero: “archive of largely satisfactory (with some exceptions) science and general cartoon foolery”
New Scientist: Last Word: Entertaining news stories culled from back issues of New Scientist.
The New Yorker Cartoon Bank: More than 20,000 cartoons published in The New Yorker.
The Onion: “America’s finest news source.”
The Periodic Table of Comic Books: Links to comic book pages involving the elements.

The Periodic Table of Poetry: Odes to the elements. Try finding something that rhymes with Molybdenum.
Piled Higher and Deeper: What grad school is really like, by a former Stanford grad student.
A Positron Named Priscilla: Scientific Discovery at the Frontier: Online book offering a fascinating, readable overview of cutting-edge investigations by many of today’s leading young scientists.
SatireWire: Essays, absurd news summaries, and other literary ephemera.
Science Cartoons Plus: Collection of science-themed cartoons by S. Harris.
Science Frontiers: The Unusual & Unexplained: Bimonthly newsletter providing digests of reports that describe scientific anomalies: those observations and facts that challenge prevailing scientific paradigms.
Smells Database: Odors of several chemicals.
Songs of Cesium: Songs about the most sublime and electropositive of all true elements, translated from the original Cesish.
The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project: Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations — experiments conducted during finals week, 1995, at Rice University, to determine the properties of the Twinkie.
Useless Information: “Stuff you never needed to know but your life would be incomplete without.”
ZDNet Reviews: Reviews of software and consumer electronics.